Well, we are continuing our study in the Sermon on the Mount this morning, and if you are a visitor, we are in chapter 6, and we have looked last time in chapter 6 at those three areas of devotion or piety or practice and sanctification, if you will, that we give to the Lord in our giving and in prayer and in fasting. In the middle of this, obviously, prayer is the great solemn activity of the Christian. Jesus gives and helps us and gives attention to how we are to pray. Our text is verses 7 through 15 this morning, page 964 of Matthew 6. We began looking at prayer last time in verses 5 and 6. I'm going to back up to 5 and read that all the way through verse 15. But 7 through 15 is the text this morning. Let's give our attention to the Lord's holy word. words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him. Pray then like this, our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors, and lead us also not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. And there we'll end today the reading of God's Word. Well, the Sermon on the Mount has certainly been challenging in many ways, exposing the sort of hypocritical we've been looking at, external religion devoid of it being in the heart. But it's really remarkable when we come to the section that we do today in the Sermon on the Mount, we have really, I believe, as I was reflecting on this, one of the most encouraging and tender sections of the Sermon on the Mount, because we have a window into what I believe that demonstrates what kind of fellowship the Lord desires of us. What we talked about practice, our piety, when that is sincere, the great blessing of that, when that is real as we've been considering. But it's the very thing I think that makes us most apprehensive in our Christian walk because we struggle with the intention of our Lord to us. It's kind of like Old Testament Israel that always says, he's just so hard to please. He's just hard to please. Who can do it? And that demonstrated, like that servant who buried the talent, that demonstrated the very attitude of a heart of somebody who didn't know the Lord. Well, that's something we have to address, the intention of our Lord to us. This demonstrates something so precious this morning because it showcases that there is intended for us and can be true communion with the Lord, true fellowship with him, as John talked about in 1 John. But this is incredibly hard for us, not only because prayer is a discipline, but because we have a hard time believing that God could love us like this, and if we haven't come there, then the practice of prayer, talking about the discipline of it, is really not going to mean much. Built into us is this sense of our, because of sin, alienation with God and the constant discouragement of it that we never really think, we never really think He desires to be that close to us. Of course, forget that He gave His Son to bring us that close, right? we forget that. Or we live thinking that the Heavenly Father is constantly in this state of being unhappy with us and that we are such failures that it's really hard to believe that His intentions could be good to us. So what do we do? Well, we stay at a distance from Him. That's easy. That's the Christianity of our day. That's the easy way to do it. Stay at a distance. That's why I think in some ways people stay away from church. It's just easier to stay at a distance from God, then we, or he, doesn't have to look too closely into our lives, we think. It's that alienation from God that produced some of the worst approaches to God in Israel when it came to devotion and piety. Because, beloved, they didn't know him. They didn't know him. They did not understand him. This is what Jeremiah said. He said, this is the great blessing that we should have. It's not in our riches or not in anything else in this life, but blessed is that one who knows him and understands him. Do you? Think of Jesus' very prayer in John 17. I pray, Father, that you would give eternal life to all that you have given to him, that you have given to him, the Son, and this is eternal life, that they may know you and the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. But the heart of Jesus' prayer is that we would know God. Do we know God? Because of this, because the Pharisees didn't know God, they created all kinds of false approaches in religion. It all became, and this is the default way when people don't know God. It's the crucial evidence when people don't know God. Everything became mechanical. Everything, they worked hard to find the right formula to please God. If we could just have the right formula, we can please God. And Jesus is going after this. Jesus is going after this now about this false approach of devotion and piety. He's already done it with giving. He's already done it with fasting, but here we're still in this crucial central devotional practice of the Christian. He is speaking of devotion that their approach to God demonstrated that they did not know him. As I said last time, their prayer was for others to see, so whether one prays or doesn't pray, all that can do, can have the intention of doing it for others. And so we come to this incredibly tender moment in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus sets us free, if you will. Jesus sets us free from all of this garbage and showy religion, Pharisee stuff, In explaining for us the desire for us to know God. So I titled the message, The Evidence of Knowing God. To know God and to come to the throne of grace with heartfelt prayer. It's not that how many of us, and we're all guilty of this, have gone to the table and just done the mechanical thing. And think we've done the duty. We see this here, this gracious God and his willingness to help us and learn, training us to learn to depend upon him in ways that demonstrates here in the Sermon on the Mount his care and his love for his people. So today, that's what we're doing briefly. We're considering Jesus' teaching on prayer. We're looking at the approach of prayer, the practice of prayer, and the motivation of prayer in three shorter points. But you'll remember in this section, Jesus is addressing the importance of the religious life of the follower of Christ, and he's addressing the crucial practices here. But all of this came with a caution. This is the caution statement that drove this section, that drives this section, beginning at verse 1 of chapter 6. Beware, said Jesus, in any of what you're doing when it comes to your walk with the Lord, devotional life to the Lord, whatever you might call it. Beware of what you're doing that you are, do not practice your, I'm giving a rough paraphrase, religion in whatever these ways are before God done with the motivation of people to see you. That you just want to show yourself so pious. You want people to think of yourself that way. We look at that last time, this approach of God was evidence of emptiness on the inside. I suppose it's more than that. If your righteousness, if we have to have a righteousness that surpasses the scribes and the Pharisees, it's an attempt to find righteousness in the acceptance of others rather than God. So what happened is, is that people tried to live to fulfill the expectations of others. And it's a strange thing when you live fulfilling the expectations of others. For when we live that way, in the expectations of others, usually people are mad at you because you're not fulfilling their expectations. It's a terrible thing that happens. I'm living to try to please somebody else, and they're never happy with me because I'm not doing it their way anyway. So the religious try to look pious and meet these standards. But a giant overcompensation is happening on the outside. that exposed emptiness on the inside. The work of the Spirit in creating new hearts is what Jesus is showcasing in prayer. The work of the Holy Spirit in the new creation in creating new hearts is what Jesus is showcasing now in prayer. That's why I said, I firmly believe, this sermon is so important for all of the ministry that is to follow in the New Covenant because it's clearing away all the dross. It's clearing away all the chaff. It's clearing away all the false religion and it's paving the way for gospel ministry to flourish by the Spirit. Well, here we are this morning in this important section of the Sermon on the Mount with that great warning. We're obviously not going into great depth today into the Lord's Prayer. I'm just briefly going through it, and I think sometimes it's helpful to kind of see the big picture of what's happening here, but I want to keep this central truth in front of us that Jesus here is describing true devotion and what that looks like in a follower of Christ. What does true devotion, and remember what I said maybe last week, that he is encouraging us that what is real is real. What is true is true. That it can be that and that it is that. You don't have to try to figure all this out. That's what he's doing for us. having warned that we should not pray like the hypocrites who pray or don't pray because the motivation is to be seen or heard, we were told to pray in secret, coming directly to our Heavenly Father. What a blessing. What a blessing, dear children, to think about that prayer is just that. It's the most solemn of religious practices because when it's done with a true heart, you realize you are directly coming before the God of heaven and earth, standing right in front of him, invited to come. Well, that's all that background leads us into the prayer itself. Before that, he gives one other caution that we didn't address last time in verse 7 but it's helpful to break into the prayer and when you pray do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do for they think they'll be heard for their many words do not be like them I don't need to go over all the history of this approach to God the pagans would would say the name of their God over and over and over and over hoping that if they said it enough they'd get his attention. Hoping if they said it right, they would get his attention. Thinking that by ever invoking the name of their God, they would finally get him to hear. That's the history of pagan prayer to this day. Think of the Hail Marys. Think of the beads. Think of all the approaches in Islam to prayer. It's been a problem in Christianity when we approach God mechanically like that. The entire Sermon on the Mount, again, is exposing that's no knowledge of God. It evidences no true knowledge of Him. No understanding, no conception of how it's even possible to come before God as a son or a daughter because of Christ there's no there's no this is rooted in this this understanding of how this is even made possible and so important there will never be a desire to pray until you understand again that God loves you and that you are coming to him as your maker who wants you to talk with him so Jesus now begins to explain what our prayer life should be like and when you pray he assumes his believers will pray. Pray like this. What he provides is not another mechanical set of statements that we are simply to say, thinking that if we just say them, then we have prayed correctly. Although it is important to say that when you can't pray, when this is a prayer that's understood, the Lord's Prayer is a wonderful prayer to pray when it comes with understanding and intention. Pray like this, says Jesus, our Father who are in heaven. Jesus is first saying that our approach to prayer should begin with a kind of invocation. I do this sort of in every service, don't I? I'm people of God. Our help is in the name of the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. We've invoked the name of the Lord. We've called upon the name of the Lord. But this is a personal approach, a kind of invocation as we come to the Lord in prayer that's warm and tender. Part of our problem in prayer, part of our challenge with prayer, is that we approach it foremost, first and foremost, with all the needs and burdens on our mind. The Psalms sometimes do that, but that's not the regular practice of prayer. Notice here that Christ calls us to invoke the Lord, as our Father. There has to be a sense that when we come to the Lord, we are praying to God that you have first considered that you are coming to your Father. Such a warm approach, isn't it, that the Jews didn't grasp what they should have? It's all throughout the Psalms. Do we believe that? That if a relationship with your child was, one, that the only communication you ever received was by text. Can I have money? Now that happens. So I'm not always going after our kids on this. Can you imagine if that was it? Can I have money? Can I have money? Can I have money? What's concerning about that? When that's the extent of the relationship. There's no knowledge or appreciation of you. Dad helps. Dad, can I have money? That helps. But to just shell out money apart from a heart of gratitude, there's something that's concerning about that. A parent deep down loves to give to his child. A good one. He wants to give his child everything. Jesus puts our approach to God in these kind of terms, which is really remarkable. That's why the old writer said it's a condescending way that God speaks to us to understand the relationship. God has stooped down to us. God has knelt down to us. He has said, children, come to me. Enjoy me. Talk to me. I'm your father. He wants you to come. To him is your Father, who is the Lord of heaven and earth, who upholds everything in his power. My Father. Do we know him that way? Do we speak to him that way? Do we understand him that way? The whole approach assumes that we are coming to him this way because of Christ, as adopted children. That we have confidence that this is the best father that any son or daughter could ever have. And what a help to you if you've had bad fathers. This is the best. He's the best. This is why Paul wrote when he spoke of all kinds of anxieties in this life. Come to him. Don't be full of anxieties. This father can actually, has the power to control everything, every circumstance. When you come to him and you're full of anxieties and you're burdened, you come to him first with prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving. There's that invoking. It's almost doxological. You're thanking him. You're praising him. You're acknowledging him. And then you can make your request known to God and he is willing to answer and to help you as a father does to his children. Jesus is anticipating all this in the next section where he talks about anxieties and giving. Is a father going to throw down a stone if a son asks him for bread? Your whole conception of God is wrong, is what Jesus is saying. You've not yet known him. It's a problem. See this in the Sermon on the Mount, what we've been dealing with? All this show religion, all this false religion. They haven't known him. So they got to compensate on the outside and try to find people that will accept them when the Father will accept you because of Christ. You see? But the Pharisees never understood or knew God. They mechanically came to him without any recognition of heartfelt trust that they could come to him this way. The first petition of the prayer, all are put in the categories real. The first three are put in the categories of adoration, if you will. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Before even we begin to think of ourselves, the Lord is calling us here to enjoy and praise God. There's something so beautiful about praise we don't enjoy. I encourage you, if you don't know how to do this, sing the Psalms in your home. And what most of you will find if you're struggling in prayer is you're never singing in your home. You have a psalm book. Enjoy God. Praise Him for all that He's said to you of who He is and what He's done. Every name given in the Bible is intended for something good for you to understand about Him, which is another reason why we struggle with prayer, which means you have to be in the Word. You have to know the Word and discern the word. That's the blessing of worship and being in church so that you get learned to know your God. That's what preaching is. People who don't do this are not praying. And people without the word are not praying. I am Jehovah Jireh to you, the God who will provide for you. I am Jehovah Rapha, the Lord who heals. I am Jehovah Ra. I am your shepherd. our greatest problem, as C.S. Lewis said, is not that our conception of God is so lofty and high. It's that our conception of God is too small because we have not yet known him the way that we should know him. And this demonstrates that we must be a people of the word and of the scriptures to know our God, to learn how to praise him and have confidence in the gospel to come to him in our worship. Pray this way. Pray your kingdom come. How selfless that is. As I thought about this, it's what it conceives of God that he's asking us to pray. What is he asking us to pray here? What is he telling us to pray for here? The kingdom come. It's as if we are saying to God, Father, you have been so wonderful in a fallen realm and a world that hates you and despises you and all this darkness and all this evil and all this rebellion. You have actually brought in a kingdom of truth that's going to come in. You are bringing light into the hearts of people who are in darkness. This is the missionary aspect of the Lord's Prayer. You are advancing your great compassions to the nations, would you continue, O Lord, in that to advance your great help to people in the gospel ministry? Would you save to the ends of the earth? Would you help the lost, the needy, and the broken? Would you bring that kingdom in, in the hearts of people? Would you remember those great promises. This is the missionary aspect of thy kingdom come. God cares to overcome the darkness with his light, and we're asking him to do that because he desires to do that. Pray like this, your will be done. May people bow to you. May people know you. May our lives, may our very lives be brought into conformity to your will of what you love and live in the freedom of that, the bounds of your law. We long for this as the angels in heaven do. Would you help us, O Lord? We see so much hatred of your law. Help us not to be a people, O Lord, who are hypocritical, but who love your will. See, notice again, the hypocritical stuff doesn't care ultimately about the will of God. We need help in this regard. Well, I told you it's a fast jet tour through this. We have just praised God in these opening ways of thinking our thoughts after Him, of training our minds to glorify Him, to praise and seek for his work to be done. But these last three petitions show how wonderful God is to care for us. It's been rightly said that this prayer covers the whole aspect of our physical needs, our mental needs, and our spiritual needs. Everything. Pray like this. Give us this day our daily bread. You know, he wants you to come to him for your bodily needs. You're pretty hard on your bodies. Did you know that? You are hard on your bodies when he cares about your body. You don't treat your bodies very well. You're the ones doing it. You know, he cares about your bodies. You know, he cares about the hairs on your head. You know, he cares so much that he has numbered them. You know, every single hair matters to him. I typically joke at this point. Some of you have lost some. He cared about everyone. That's pretty amazing. Bread symbolizes all that we need in this life to be kept alive. Every moment, we have to be sustained by him. It's hard in America to appreciate this because we have so much. You see what I said? This demonstrates the new heart that he's after in our earthly walk. He knows everything you need. He knows everything you need and he wants you to talk to him about it. I remember being at a prayer of a service, a worship service where the pastor said, you know, we're ditching the congregational prayer. By the way, the congregational prayer is almost gone in churches across this country. I don't say this proudly as if, good job, Pastor Gordon. I don't. But I think it's a sad development. Think about what he said. He said, you know, God knows everything you need. We're just going to get in small groups and talk about that. Is that right? Would we need the Lord's Prayer if that's true? I want everyone to come together as a people, and his emphasis on prayer in the closet does not throw out congregational prayer. It's a worship activity of the gathered saints that has been throughout the history of the church and in the scriptures. I want everyone to come to me and talk to me about their physical needs. I know them. He's your father. I don't know if there's anything more moving here. I know that you are burdened about your physical lives. If we think about how much we worry about this. I know that in providences, some of you are facing hard things. I know that you struggle and you desire things. I know that in your bodies, you're worried about your health. I know that you're constantly worried about these things, and it can consume you. For some, it's all they ever think about. It's not that God's ever holding back a good gift. He has always promised to provide what you need. Did you hear Psalm 34 today? The righteous lack nothing good from the Lord. There is no need to worry about your future. There is no need to worry about those things. He knows best. James Boyce used to say, he would give it to you all right now if you could handle it. That's how good he is. But he dishes it out in his time and promises it all in the resurrection. this is the prayer of God's goodness to us and help to us, that he will supply not everything we want, as the prosperity people say, but everything that we need and that he cares to do this. Speak to me, children, in your closets. Don't run around telling everyone else about all this. Why don't you talk to me? when you have my ear and you have your father's love because of Christ. I want you to come to me as a child with his father and tell me and depend on me, I'm going to provide for you. God is not being strengthened by this. We're not adding to God's glory in doing this. He's fully glorified. Your talking to him demonstrates and is forming you and your trust of him as a child and to enjoy him. That you can't exist apart a single moment without him. Pray like this. Father, forgive our trespasses even as we forgive others. I'll come back to that in a moment. Pray like this. Father, lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Father, I am so prone to wander. I am so prone to go into sin. I am so prone to go do something that could wreck every good thing in my life. Love of my wife, love of my children. I'm so prone to do that. I'm so prone to walk into something. I need your help every moment so that I don't walk into a sinful path. Lead me not in. You are so sovereign, I need you to direct all my paths that I would never go astray. Lead me not into it. That's how sovereign you are. in all the situations of my life, all the lusts that I'm prone to, I need you to so guide me and lead me that I would never find myself into a situation that I will go and do the sin that I want to do. The reason many of us are falling into sin is because we're not using the means that are being offered to us right here. Now, at the end of this, Jesus does something surprising. It's always baffled me. Which petition do you pick after this to kind of focus on at the end? Well, he concludes the teaching on prayer with this. For if you forgive others your trespasses, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. Why single that out? That almost makes it sound like a conditional thing. Well, I think we get to the heart of the Sermon on the Mount in this one. Pharisees never had the ability to admit they were ever wrong about anything. They could never go up to somebody and say, I have sinned to the Lord and to people. They couldn't do it. They were so full of pride. Jesus is not here saying we avoid confronting the Pharisees or sin or pointing out sin in people's lives. That's not what he's saying. Why does he single it out, though? What is the essence and capstone of all true religion or all false religion? It would be to claim that God has forgiven you and that God has loved you and yet in your whole life you have continued to hate and refuse to forgive everyone else. This to me is the ultimate exposure of whether we know God or not. That's why he's hitting it. This one strikes at the gospel we profess. The intention of the Christian should be when someone sees their sin and comes to you and confesses their sin and humbles themselves that we are always ready to forgive. We are ready and willing to forget, just like our father. See that connection? How ready is the father to forgive? He's publishing all the time. Come to me. Confess your sins. I'll forgive them all. God has forgiven us. But in our lives, we continually do things that provoke him. things that are awful. Does any Christian disagree with this? In our Christian walk, we constantly find ourselves doing things we don't want to do. And he's compassionate. And every Sunday, he's having his law read with a great aim. That's why the law should be read. That even though he has fully washed you in justification and cleansed you and cleared your consciences. He constantly calls you back to him, and he knows you still need forgiveness in your life. 70 times 70 does it. His hand is open. His heart is open to you. Confess your sins to me. I'm faithful and just to forgive your sins and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness. What does that do to you? Well, if you haven't confessed your own sins and you haven't humbled yourself, it doesn't mean a thing. It doesn't mean a thing. And it's certainly not going to showcase in how you treat others. The man who claims this and knows this, who can call God his father, what kind of man claims that? And in turn refuses the same character quality of his God that has shaped him then goes out and refuses to forgive somebody else. That's the man who doesn't know his father. You see? He doesn't know him. And this means it will show in how we treat people that there's not a judgmental spirit on us all the time on everyone. Jesus is about to address this in the Sermon on the Mount. But a merciful one that seeks the good. Jesus is not saying, if you don't do this, neither will you be forgiven. He's exposing the ultimate test. He says, forgive even as your Father has forgiven you. We come asking him for help. It's the consequence of the forgiven life. But you see the point of that? We need help in this too. We need help in that too. And the sincere prayer of the Christian is, I need help to do that. that our lives, as we have known your love, the very character of Christ who loved us and died for us, would be demonstrated as we forgive even the most difficult in our lives when they come to us confessing their sins. For it's your gospel that has made this so. The whole prayer summarily is demonstrating that our talking with God is rooted and grounded in the assurance of God's love for us in Christ. as new creatures, by his Spirit. That's the assurance that changes everything. This is what he's after, not the mechanical approach that tries to manipulate God and is more concerned about outward conformity so that everyone thinks we're righteous. Some manuscripts have, at the end, for thine is the kingdom, power, and glory forever. It's a good ending. It's always a good ending to begin with praise and to end with praise for a God who has loved us like this. But I close with this. May we be encouraged as his people to go into our closets and pray to him. It's not a burden. It should be like the Sabbath, a delight. And if it's a burden, we have not yet come to delight. And my guess is there's a great tie to viewing the Sabbath and worship as a burden to viewing prayer as a burden. This love, Christ's love, is the only love that matters so that we have the ear and favor and love of the Father through him. We have it. That's why he died, to give it to us. Prayer is the evidence in our lives that we know him, that he is our God and Father because of Christ. So talk to him. He's your father. Pray to him. He loves you. Call to him for help. He'll give it. The righteous lack no good thing. And when you come to him with this prayer, he will always hear his children. Let's pray to him. Let's say it together. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power. and the glory forever. Amen.